The cold-storage alarm log was not supposed to be part of the acceptance package.
It belonged to a tenant served by the annex, and its recorded values concerned temperature alarms rather than the performance of the battery installation. The operator initially refused to provide it to the technical reviewers. Amina agreed with the refusal.
“Then how do we know whether the service feeder remained active?” Yanchuan asked.
“We ask for evidence within the question we’re permitted to examine. We don’t take a customer’s records because they might be interesting.”
Through the designated engineer, they requested an aggregate confirmation of feeder activity for the disputed period, without tenant identifiers, storage temperatures, or operational details. The operator returned a limited summary with a timestamp range and a description of the metering source.
Power had been recorded on the service feeder during the interval the acceptance summary described as unavailable for operation.
Yanchuan printed the two sentences and laid them beside his earlier note about the generator’s additional hour.
“That’s a contradiction,” he said to Han.
“It might be. Tell me which system was unavailable.”
“The acceptance test.”
“And what did the contractor mean by operation?”
Yanchuan looked at the reply from December. The contractor said separately maintained facilities were outside the acceptance scope. Its earlier wording had treated excluded data as though the facility itself had not been active.
“So the site wasn’t dead,” he said.
“Do not write that. A meter showing supply to one feeder doesn’t tell you the state of every building.”
He crossed out dead in the working summary.
Amina arranged a short call with the engineer who had certified the aggregate. He explained that the feeder was supplied through a configuration allowing service during some changes to the primary test equipment. The meter showed electrical delivery, not why a particular load was connected or whether any person was present.
“Could it be the generator?” Yanchuan asked.
“Possibly for part of the interval. The available readings do not separate every source at this resolution.”
“Can you tell whether the cooling equipment was operating?”
“Not from this aggregate alone.”
The answers had no drama. That made them usable.
At lunch Yanchuan passed a building site where workers were installing temporary lighting from a portable supply. The main service had been isolated for a repair. He stopped long enough to watch the lights remain on while the workers changed the cable route.
A supply could continue without a building being fully operational. A test could stop without a site becoming dark. A summary could describe a boundary correctly and still invite a larger conclusion.
He called An and explained the point in ordinary language.
“Some power continued going to the annex,” he said. “That doesn’t tell us who was there.”
“Does it change what they should search?”
“It may change what records they request.”
Wanjiru agreed that the technical information could be relevant to a narrower inquiry about the compound’s activity. She prepared a note asking whether the existing missing-person case checks had covered staff and vehicle movements associated with the feeder’s maintenance period. The request did not demand tenant data or speculate about a hidden room.
The following week, Guo’s firm replied to Chen’s proposed feasibility-study terms. It accepted that no figure could be published without its assumptions, but wanted a general summary it could show prospective partners. Chen had them specify that the summary could describe methods and nonconfidential results, not imply that an untested installation had been certified.
“What would we be selling them?” Yanchuan asked.
“Work,” Chen said. “Not reassurance.”
They agreed to examine a separate industrial site near Shenzhen, subject to a documented conflict check. Yanchuan would be one of two engineers and would not use materials obtained through his family inquiry.
It was a small contract. It might fund ordinary salaries for a month. It would not fund a second journey to Kenya by itself, and Chen reminded him it was not meant to.
On the first visit they measured demand in a production workshop whose afternoon heat came from machines working harder than the model assumed. A technician showed them a door that had to stay open for ventilation and a meter installed where it was easy to read rather than where the system boundary actually lay.
“If you count only that meter,” she said, “you’ll sell them a beautiful story.”
Yanchuan looked at the additional load they had nearly omitted. He felt no revelation, only the practical embarrassment of having to add another measurement.
That evening Amina sent an update. The operator had acknowledged that the phrase unavailable for operation did not establish physical inactivity of the service feeder. A revised technical statement would distinguish the acceptance-test boundary from the annex’s actual supplied loads.
“Will that affect the final sign-off?” he asked.
“The operator is reviewing it,” she said. “Not my decision.”
He thanked her and asked whether Daniel’s family had received the corrected payment. Rose had confirmed one outstanding expense remained. Amina said the workplace case was continuing separately.
Yanchuan did not turn that into a clue.
For several days the service-feeder readings sat in the folder without producing a new movement in the missing-person chronology. He was disappointed by how easily he had imagined power as presence: lights burning somewhere meant someone could have seen his brother, someone must have noticed a visitor, someone would remember.
Then the investigator sent Wanjiru a request for the dates and identifiers of maintenance tickets associated with the feeder, limited to the period around October 30. The technical record had supplied a reason to ask a specific question. That was progress of a kind he had learned to recognize.
An called from the supermarket. She was standing before a shelf of toothpaste, deciding whether to buy the kind Yansheng used.
“Buy it if you want it in the house,” he said.
“That’s not an answer.”
“No.”
She bought the toothpaste. Later she told him she had also bought a different kind for herself.
In Shenzhen, Yanchuan closed the feeder plot. It showed a line above zero while a report seemed to describe nothing happening.
He had once hoped every such line would point to his brother. Now he could see it for what it was: evidence that a machine had continued supplying something the acceptance story left outside its frame.
The people who maintained that supply were becoming visible as names and records. He searched the list of operators once more, although he knew Yansheng would not appear there. Then he closed it and called An without pretending he had news.